Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  While the SF officers put their heads together to come up with a new plan, they sent some of Zia Lodin’s men into Carwazi to see what was there. The AMF troops went through every building in the village and found no enemy fighters but about twenty women, old men, and children, all of whom they detained for a few hours. The Hammer leaders also expanded their security perimeter, putting Afghans on the Guppy and other high ground around Carwazi.

  McHale and Thomas then communed. Things were falling apart, and they decided to come up with a common position to present to Haas on what would be required for them to continue the attack. The fire taken by TF Hammer to the west of the Whale had come as a shock. No-one in Bagram or Gardez had expected Al Qaida’s defenses to extend that far west, but the volume of fire indicated that the convoy was already inside the enemy’s defensive belt. That meant one thing for certain: driving through the constricted terrain of the Fishhook would be a hard fight. The Americans correctly surmised that their enemies would have DShKs pointing down into that defile, which was only wide enough to allow a single vehicle to pass at one time. “They had that place laced pretty tight,” said one TF Hammer NCO. Task Force Hammer had been left with no good options. Even if they made it past Carwazi and Gwad Kala, attacking through the Fishhook with such a loosely controlled force and without close air support held few prospects for success. The wadi at the southern tip of the Whale was a natural ambush point. All the Al Qaida gunners would have to do to stall the convoy and turn the passage of Task Force Hammer into a turkey shoot was knock out the lead truck.

  The two A-team leaders told Haas that they were willing to press ahead into the Shahikot only if they could get close air support to destroy or suppress the enemy they were sure would be waiting for them in the high ground overlooking the Fishhook. “If you start dropping bombs in and around Surki, no problem, we’re gonna attack,” McHale told Haas. But getting that sort of close air support required a detailed understanding of what was happening in the Shahikot in general, and the locations of the TF Rakkasan forces in particular—all information that the Task Force Hammer officers lacked. “We never had a good clear picture of what was going on with Task Force Rakkasan,” McHale said. “We knew they were in contact, but we didn’t know exactly where they were, or from which direction they were drawing fire,” McHale said. “Continuing to fight a plan that was not very well conceived to begin with seemed foolish. Our greatest fears could have been realized, fighting right into a fratricide incident.” Under these conditions, the captains saw little point in proceeding into the valley. “Clearly, we are not the main effort right now,” McHale told the lieutenant colonel. Haas agreed. Nevertheless, all three officers started drawing up contingency plans in case they received the close air support.

  Haas called Mulholland, who told him the situation for Task Force Rakkasan on the other side of the Whale was bad and that all available jets were being directed to help the infantry in the Shahikot. TF Hammer was getting similar reports from the AFO recon teams above the valley. Looking south from his position just south of the defile, Haas agreed with the A-team leaders that the “bowl” beside Gwad Kala and Surki would be a death trap for his trucks unless he received some serious fire support. With that looking less and less likely, he planned instead to maneuver Zia’s forces on foot towards the Fishhook, using the high ground just west of Gwad Kala as cover.

  Task Force Hammer was finally given a lone F-15E Strike Eagle, but this only resulted in more exasperation. Despite the assistance of TF Hammer’s two Air Force enlisted tactical air controllers and one Air Force combat controller, the pilot flew back and forth for forty-five minutes but couldn’t locate the task force on the ground and was reluctant to drop his bombs, even when told to just drop them anywhere on the enormous mass of the Whale. He continued circling above Hammer until he was “bingo” fuel, at which he point he left without delivering his ordnance, a tremendously frustrating experience for the troops on the ground who had been waiting hours for an aircraft. How can you not find this mountain? Haas thought. “We had mirrors out shining up at him, thirty-seven vehicles with VS-17 panels on top of them, and he could not find us,” McHale recalled. “My only explanation is the battlefield was too confusing by that time, with too many elements on the ground, and he wasn’t comfortable enough to drop a bomb.” Other than a French Mirage jet that missed its target by over 2,000 meters, this was the only fixed wing aircraft apportioned to Task Force Hammer after the initial bombing of the Whale.

  Soon, the enemy brought more firepower to bear against the troops hunkered down outside Carwazi. At 10 a.m. a BM-21 rocket flew about 100 feet over their heads with a loud buzzing sound before burying itself in the ground without detonating. (The rocket was almost certainly not fired from a launcher, but from a leaning position against a rock, a technique the mujahideen had used against the Soviets.)

  Shortly afterward, as McHale was walking the perimeter, the quick reaction force sent to assist Harriman’s convoy rejoined the main column. A few minutes later ODA 372’s team leader strode back to the cluster of vehicles at the center of the position where Master Sergeant John Deane, aka “JD,” his senior NCO, was waiting with tears in his eyes. “Did you hear?” JD said. “What are you talking about?” McHale replied. “Chief didn’t make it,” JD said. It was a crushing blow, but the team leader’s initial response to the news of his second in command’s death was a numb disbelief. “You spend your whole career in the Army saying, ‘There’s a potential to lose guys in this business,’” McHale said, recalling the moment. “But when it actually happens…” his voice trailed off. For a few moments the numbness remained, and then the thought of Harriman’s two fatherless children hit him like an emotional sledgehammer and the tears flowed. The others left the two alone to grieve together for several long minutes.

  IN the early afternoon what had been relatively desultory mortar fire aimed at the Hammer position suddenly intensified after the fog that had obscured the top of the Whale for about an hour cleared. The increased range and caliber of whatever was shooting at them led Haas to believe that the enemy had brought “at least one” D-30 122mm howitzer in Babulkhel into action, using spotters on top of the Whale to radio target information to the gunners in the village on the valley floor. (U.S. troops later found a map in Babulkhel with target reference points plotted all along Hammer’s route west of the Whale.) As the shells rained down, Spider had a lucky escape. Seconds after he wandered away from his Toyota 4Runner to confer with Haas, an incoming round showered his side of the vehicle with shrapnel. The whistle of the dropping artillery shells was punctuated by the occasional sizzle of a recoilless rifle round flying overhead. With rounds exploding thick and fast around them, the SF officers realized they were sitting ducks. They had to move somewhere that was hidden from the enemy observers on the Whale. Their sense that action had to be taken soon was heightened at 1:50 p.m. when Schwartz reported that about twenty enemy fighters were moving along nearby ridgelines trying to outflank his position.

  Haas called Zia over to brief him on his plan to push the Afghan forces south using the high ground as cover. He also gave the order to move the trucks out of sight behind a low ridgeline nearby. But when they heard that, the Afghans decided enough was enough. Their morale was already low as a result of the fratricide incident, the truck accidents, and being on the receiving end of mortar, rocket, artillery, RPG and automatic weapons fire all day. One or two drivers decided that if they were going to move the trucks, they would instead pull them back through the defile northwest of Carwazi. On board the trucks were the Afghan troops’ duffel bags, containing all the highly prized gear they had received from the Americans. As soon as he saw the truck with his duffel bag disappearing, one of the Afghan officers left his position and sprinted after it. Inevitably, his men followed, turning a misunderstanding into a pell-mell retreat. Haas’ perimeter was collapsing as the Afghans ran back to the defile. “They didn’t panic, but they started withdrawing fast,” McHale said.
So fast, in fact, that they abandoned their mortars and ammunition. Two Texas 14 men, Sergeant First Class Maurice Golden and Staff Sergeant Greg Sabus, were having none of that and pulled some of the Afghans out of the trucks to police up their equipment. Haas sent an American truck to chase down and halt the lead Afghan trucks, but the Afghans didn’t pause until they were several hundred meters west of the defile. Meanwhile, the rest of Task Force Hammer was still in headlong retreat through the defile, with men outrunning vehicles as the convoy bunched up at the eastern entrance to the pass.

  It was there, in the mass of men and machines just east of the choke point, that a mortar or artillery round detonated ten to fifteen meters to the right of the silver Toyota truck driven by Sergeant First Class James Van Antwerp and the truck in front of it. The blast shattered the windows and punctured the tires on the silver truck, which carried four special operators, and blew the bed off the other truck. Van Antwerp tried desperately to restart the smoking engine, but nothing happened when he turned the key. As other rounds followed, all of them far too close for comfort, Master Sergeant John Deane, ODA 372’s senior NCO, who was riding in the back, gave the order to abandon the truck. Ditching the Toyota, which carried not only all their personal gear but also much of the material recovered from Harriman’s vehicle, the four troops ran for their lives, carrying only their weapons, ammunition, GPS receivers and a couple of radios. They didn’t stop until they reached a wadi about 1,000 meters from the truck. They met up with other U.S. and AMF fighters there, and rejoined the main body of the convoy farther west. Meanwhile, the silver truck quickly became a target for the enemy mortars, with rounds landing all around it, and therefore all around the Hammer troops still stuck at the choke point. One of the rounds hit home, killing an AMF fighter instantly and wounding several others, three of whom “got screwed up pretty bad,” McHale recounted. Haas had brought along his battalion surgeon, Captain Robert Price, a young doctor new to the Special Forces world, for just this sort of situation. The doc told Haas three of the wounded Afghans were “litter urgent” and several others were less badly hurt but still needed a medevac. But Haas knew that no U.S. military helicopter would land on what was a hot LZ with incoming mortar and artillery rounds. He turned to Spider. Not for the first or last time, the CIA operative came through. The veteran agency paramilitary fighter called his higher headquarters in Kabul. Within 45 minutes one of the CIA’s Mi-17s was kicking up dust as it picked up the wounded Afghans. The medevac mission restored a little of the Americans’ battered prestige in the eyes of Zia. “It showed that we were willing to accept risk to our aircraft to come get his wounded,” Haas said.

  Then RPGs started whooshing over the heads of the men of Task Force Hammer, an indication that the enemy fighters Schwartz had seen earlier had now penetrated the loose cordon of AMF troops on the nearby hilltops to get within a few hundred meters of the vehicles. All this happened as the AMF fighters manning that perimeter were running back along the high ground parallel to the main body of the convoy. The Special Forces troops managed to halt about half of the convoy west of the defile on a dirt track bounded on either side by sand that was too loose for the trucks. They rounded up as many AMF fighters as they could, counted heads again and tried to link all the Afghans up with their commanders and vehicles. But as they did so some of the older Afghans—battle-scarred mujahideen in their forties and fifties—began to take out their frustrations on their younger brethren. “They’re so upset that they’ve left the battlefield that they’re dragging guys out of the backs of the trucks and kicking the shit out of them,” Haas recalled. “Talk about chaos.” Like military policemen, the SF troops had to jump into the melee to break up the brawls.

  With fistfights raging around them, Haas and Zia looked west and saw several jinga trucks still barreling towards the Zermat road. Zia sent several subordinates to chase the trucks down and Haas turned his attention back to the headcount. But while Haas was distracted, Zia decided to take off after the errant vehicles himself. Then one of Hammer’s CIA operatives delivered an alarming message to Haas: Zia was planning to attack Zermat. Haas quickly concluded his attempts to reorganize the convoy and ordered it to move out in the direction Zia had taken. The Special Forces lieutenant colonel finally caught up with his G-chief on the outskirts of Zermat, where Zia was walking down the line of vehicles talking on the radio.

  The G-chief in whom the Americans had placed so much faith was becoming unhinged. “Zia is just beside himself now,” Haas recalled. “He’s embarrassed by his guys, he didn’t get the fifty-five minutes of [close air support] like he thought he would, he’s taking casualties, and he feels like he’s been let down by his guys, by me, by everybody.” Again the Afghan leader walked up to Haas and, with a face like thunder and his hands raised to the heavens, screamed “Kojast planes?!?” (“Where are the planes?!?”) “He didn’t speak much English, but he understood ‘planes,’” Haas recalled.

  In his frustration and desire to redeem himself in the eyes of the Americans, Zia confirmed his patrons’ worst fears. “I am attacking Zermat!” he told Haas through an interpreter. “The enemy is there, I can’t get to the valley, so I am attacking Zermat—there are enemy there.” “No you’re not,” said Haas, appalled that his G-chief was even proposing this course of action. “I am attacking Zermat!” Zia reiterated. “They are all traitors. They told everybody we were coming. We are attacking Zermat!” With that he turned and began rounding up his men.

  The SF officers at the heart of TF Hammer knew everything had changed. They were no longer being treated as the main effort—if they ever had been—and events in the Shahikot were now playing the decisive role in the decision-making at Bagram. They needed to know what role Mountain headquarters foresaw for them. “Were we counter-attacking? Were we relieving pressure? It was now a totally different ball game,” McHale said. But the SF officers couldn’t even get a clear picture of how the battle was unfolding elsewhere. “We were not getting good feedback on that—where were the 101st? How far had they gone?” McHale recalled. The confusion and chaos had reached “the point where our attack didn’t make sense…. Nobody likes going backward, but where are we going to go to? What piece of terrain are we going to go seize and what support are we going to get to get there? If you can slice us something [in terms of air power], and it’s effective and useful, then put us somewhere. But there was no mission given to us…. There wasn’t a good, solid FRAGO [fragmentary order] that came out from any one headquarters that said, ‘Okay, break, break, break, here’s the situation, this is what we’re gonna do,’” McHale said. “None of that was coming down. Nobody had another plan for where do we go from here.” There was no way Hammer was going to stay where they were. “We needed to get out of there, because staying right there outside of Zermat and camping there that night was bad juju,” McHale said. The morale of their Afghan allies had sunk to new lows. “They were pissed, they’d taken casualties, yet they didn’t feel like they were getting any air support,” McHale said.

  For Hammer’s remaining Afghan fighters, the Americans’ inability to deliver their vaunted air power when it was needed was the final straw. They had suffered chaos, confusion and casualties in the drive from Gardez, then been attacked by an American aircraft, killing and wounding more of their colleagues, seen the promised “fifty-five-minute” bombardment of the Whale turn into something closer to a fifty-five-second bombardment, and when the enemy fighters left undisturbed on that massive humpback mountain turned their guns and mortars on the convoy, the Americans had no response.

  Now Task Force Hammer was back on the road where its problems began over twelve hours previously. They were out of range of the mortars on the Whale, but their new location wasn’t making the SF officers feel much more secure. Many of the trucks were parked just fifty meters from a compound where anyone could have stuck their head over the wall and sprayed the line of vehicles with AK fire. “Zermat was not a friendly town, we were standing out in the middl
e of the desert, we couldn’t drive off the road, so we were really not in a defendable place right there,” McHale recalled. “It was just a horrible place to be.”

  Haas eventually dissuaded Zia from attacking Zermat, but the price was high. The furious Afghan leader decided to pull his troops off the battlefield altogether. “I’m not staying here,” he said. “If I can’t attack Zermat, it’s stupid for me to stay, because I will be attacked from Zermat. You let me down. I am going back to Gardez.” At the same time, Mulholland called, urging Haas to get Zia back into the fight. Haas, who felt that his force had already “taken an ass-kicking,” tried to explain why that wasn’t possible. “I’ve got a serious problem here,” the lieutenant colonel told his boss. “Zia’s unloading.” “You’ve gotta stop him,” replied Mulholland, who had promised the Mountain planners that his G-chief would not let them down. “You’ve gotta keep him in the fight.”

  “We were attempting to encourage them not to fall back, but instead to hold what they had, to stay in the field,” Rosengard, the Dagger operations officer, said. “We knew that to be a stretch, but we wanted it to occur.” While Haas spoke with Mulholland on the Dagger command net, Zia paced up and down the line of trucks talking to his subordinates on his own hand-held radio. Haas was caught between a rock and a hard place. His boss was ordering him to prevent Zia from leaving the area, but the Afghan leader had other ideas. Haas struggled to explain the reality on the ground to the TF Dagger commander while keeping Zia close enough to ensure that the G-chief didn’t take off on his own again. After a few minutes Zia had had enough. He climbed into his pickup, gave the order to move and the Afghan convoy began heading toward Gardez.

  Haas spoke bluntly with Mulholland. “This is the deal,” he said. “Zia’s leaving.” If Hammer had to retain a presence near the Shahikot, Haas suggested concentrating his U.S. troops with the AFO guys at their observation post by the Guppy. Mulholland wasn’t interested. “You’ve gotta get Zia to stay,” he insisted. “Zia’s not staying,” Haas replied. “In fact, Zia’s driving down the road right now. We can either lead him, or follow him.”